New to orchids; advice please

Hi Kate,phalaenopsis do flower for long periods ,so not unusual.Outdoors for the cymbidium as you said is good,back inside before the first frost(this should get it to reflower),but watch out for water getting into the growths late summer/autumn otherwise you may lose leaves to rot ..I will shelter mine from above and water them myself.Phals and Zygos are easier to reflower so you shouldnt have any problems with these,just give them 10 f min temp difference day/night,i have never done this by altering my heater setup.I just set my heater to my min required and let nature take its course.And my orchids reflower . As for the aquatic pots,i have tried them but the plant roots grow through the holes making future repotting difficult and they do dry out alot quicker.So you will have to take your conditions into account when deciding what to grow your plants in.If indoors i would only use standard pots ,not baskets or mounted as watering/misting is almost impossible to maintain. Hope this helps

Keith can give you great information. I will also suggest that there are plant grow advice pages at AOS and may very well be in some of the UK websites as well.

IF there is an orchid group that meets near you, they would be a great reference as to local conditions and best practices with the materials available.

As Keith suggested Living with a dripping pot is difficult unless you have a glasshouse that you can grow in during the winter. Most of us pot up with some type of bark mix. These mixes vary around our country and I am sure mine is different than what you can find locally. Some people grow in Semi-Hydro pots and aggregate. You can read about that at First Ray's

Phal's are known for blooming a long time. Watch that your plant also sends out a leaf in the next 6 months. IF it has not started a new leaf and is still blooming in 6 months, I would consider cutting off the flowers just to force the plant to think of growing instead of blooming. But if it grows a new leaf - it can bloom continuously.

Please stop back and let us know how your doing. As Keith suggested this is an addictive hobby and the collections take on a life of their own. SuE

"SuE" snipped-for-privacy@evilsoft.org wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

Thanks for the reply, SuE. I have done a UK search for orchid cultivation and, of course, there were loads of hits, some with very complicated instructions. I did find one website that gave simple rule-of-thumb advice : more heat = more water and higher humidity, and vice versa. Also, if in doubt, don`t water, as it is easier to bring a plant back from drought than it is from waterlogging. What I found complicated was which plants required a rest period, and when, re-potting and feeding. Regarding re-potting, the advice for Cymbidiums I found was to re-pot when the pseudobulbs are hanging out of the pot or a lot of roots are exposed. The cymbidium I have does not conform to either of these criteria, but I have noticed that all of the roots exposed on the surface of the mix are dead. As the pot is opaque, I cannot see how many active roots there are beneath the bark. Should I remove it from its pot and investigate? If so, when? Its one flower spike is still perfect (a beautiful egg-yolk yellow) and there is either a new spike growing or a new pseudobulb (can`t tell which at the moment). Then feeding - some sites recommended feeding weekly, fortnightly or so on, and others advised feeding at every water, with a plain wash through every month or so. I know that orchids are weak feeders, but it sounds more natural to feed at every water, since, in the wild, any available nutrients will wash down over the plant every time it rains. Sounds logical, but is it right?

Thanks again Kate

Hi Kate, Feeding is a minefield !everyone here will be using a different regime.Some people keep it simple,others use allsorts of concoctions.I think a good starting point is to use a balanced liquid feed weekly, weakly(1/4 strength)then one week forget the feed and flush through the pot. You are doing the right thing and sounds like you are getting decent info. Keep reading this newsgroup too,this is the first time in ages i have come out of the woodwork and posted a reply ,but i am always lurking most nights!! Cheers Keith

Welcome Kate, You have already received some great advice from Sue & Keith. I just want to add that Cymbidiums are said to be heavy feeders so you could give them some Osmocote as well. We repot at this time or after blooming, if the plant needs it, here on the west coast of the USA. They do like to be rootbound which to me makes it harder to water them. They are grown outside here all year round. We had a fellow on our group that grew them up in Scotland, can't remember his name & I think he used lights in the winter. Good luck with your babies & may all your troubles be more orchids!*G* Cheers Wendy

Cym feed heavily (given the chance) early in the season - right after blooming. Never feed them in the fall -- IF they are standard cym or miniatures that grow as standards. A friend repots in 1/2 mushroom compost & 1/2 orchid bark that is either old in the bag or used for something that was repotted in 6 mo. Thus he has a bark that is starting to break down and well aged compost. This is a hot mixture and does not need additional fertilizer. IF repotted in April/May before taking outside they will be aromatic while outside and less so by fall when you want to bring them back in.

IF they are summer or Chinese cym they bloom in the summer and weakly, weekly is good advice. These I grow in Semi-Hydro. My Cym Golden Elf has broken its pot again. It keeps growing such strong and full roots it breaks the clear plastic pot it is in.

Kieth that was a great reply! Simple, short and friendly! You should come out of the woodwork more often! By 1/4 strength you mean when my liquid Orchid Food calls for one teaspoon per gallon I should use 1/4 teaspoon per gallon? Are the OF guys just trying to sell more food? I have read this here and elsewhere for years and always found it very strange. Joe T

Fertilizing is more of a pasture than minefield, but one that's still loaded with things you don't want to step on.

I'm not pointing at Keith here, as this sort of info has been spread around for years by many (including me), but recommendations like "1/2-" or "1/4 strength" are of little value as fertilizers come in all sorts of strengths, and manufacturers have all sorts of different label recommendations, so it's almost as good as "feed adequately".

Plants have very specific nutritional needs, and they "focus", if you will, on nitrogen, with the balance of the minerals tailored to match the needs of the plant and to be in proportion to the nitrogen content.

One must also keep in mind that plants will grow to their maximum, genetically-determined potential if everything is perfect. Any cultural shortcoming - including feeding - and the plant will not grow as well as it can.

I'm sure each type of plant has different needs (and I am probably remembering my number wrong, but it still serves as a good example), but it is well-established in the trade that a poinsettia needs 1 gram of nitrogen to go from rooted cutting to maturity in that finite period starting in late summer for Christmas sales. For discussion sake, let's say it's a 20-week period, so the plants must be fed 50 milligrams per week of nitrogen for maximum growth rate. As their livelihoods depend on it, the commercial grower knows how much solution is held by the media they use, so based upon that, the pot size, and the watering frequency needed to keep the medium moist, they know what concentration of fertilizer to mix.

While I don't plan on being that specific in my orchid culture - my wide variety of plants and media would need a lot of variations anyway - it seems to me that it is far wiser to shoot for a specific nitrogen content and adjust the fertilizer concentration to meet that. Then, after you have gotten enough experience with that level, adjust it and see how your plants respond, and continue experimenting until you are satisfied. I use 125-150 ppm N from GreenCare Pure Water Formula at every watering (and the label has no "recommended" application level), as it is about the max the phrags can handle in my conditions. As another example, Dr. Yin-Tung Wang at Texas A&M found that 250 ppm N is near the best for phals in his greenhouses in Texas.

So now that I have vented "professorially" for the morning, let's look at the difference in approaches in practice:

Using Dyna-Gro "Grow" (7-9-5) and "Bloom" (3-12-6) formulations, the label recommendation calls for 1/2 teaspoon per gallon every time you water. That corresponds to roughly 46 and 20 ppm N, respectively. I would use 1.5- to 2 teaspoons per gallon of the "Grow" formula, and 6 or 7 teaspoons of "Bloom" to reach my preferred nitrogen target, but if I followed the "1/4 of label strength" formula, I'd be practically starving my plants at roughly 12 and 5 ppm N.

If I was using Mir-Acid (30-10-10, and I don't recommend it for orchids) with a teaspoon-per-gallon recommendation, I'd cut back to a third of a teaspoon per gallon to get 125 ppm N, and the 1/4 tsp/gal is mighty close at about 100.

That it very useful, Ray. I found your on-line fertilizer calculator very helpful as I won`t have to rely on guesswork in future.

Thanks Kate

On doing some more research, I read that bark neutralises nitrogen to an extent, so orchids grown in bark should receive a higher ppm N. What are your views?

Kate